US pushes to keep foreign-born entrepreneurs in this country

Thursday

Nov 29, 2012 at 6:00 AM

By Rodrique Ngowi THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

The Obama administration’s top immigration official says his agency is working to attract and keep more foreign-born high-tech entrepreneurs who are seeking to start companies in the U.S., a move he hopes will help the nation retain its edge in an increasingly competitive global economy.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service Director Alejandro Mayorkas acknowledged on Wednesday that his agency “has not been especially nimble” to adapt to fast-paced changes in the business landscape, even though it has been quick to respond to the humanitarian landscape.

That is changing, Mayorkas said, since the agency added new training for adjudicators who evaluate business visa applications, including those for H-1B visas — temporary employment visas for specialty occupations — sponsored by startups companies whose profiles do not fit those of traditional businesses.

“Three years ago if we’d received a petition for a H-1B visa from an individual working in a cubicle who might have received funding from a respectable venture capital firm, adjudicators might have rejected that application,” Mayorkas told students and investors at the Sloan School of Management of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“One of the goals of the immigration system: family unity, humanitarian relief and economic prosperity,” he said. “And it is in the context of economic prosperity that we really are speaking today.”

He unveiled a new website that provides entrepreneurs an easier way to navigate their immigration options under the so-called “Entrepreneur Pathways” initiative.

The measure is the first product of the unusual Entrepreneurs in Residence program under which the immigration agency recruited five entrepreneurs who reviewed the system and proposed changes to make it easier for investors to figure out their immigration options and communicate with the agency.

Next step? A review of existing laws and practices to ensure that they achieve their full potential.

“We’ve done a remarkable job, I think, in training our adjudication corps in terms of unique profiles of startup companies and our entrepreneurs,” Mayorkas said. “But it is no substitute for the need for legislative reforms.”

The initiatives drew rare praise from entrepreneur and Duke University researcher Vivek Wadhwa.

“It’s the type of creative thinking that’s needed to fix it because if you speak to immigration lawyers, they tell you that the big problem that they have (with visa applications) is inconsistency, the same problem entrepreneurs have … they never get a straight answer,” Wadhwa said.

“So what they did here is they had a bunch of entrepreneurs work with the USCIS to go through the entire process, go through the books and see what was wrong with the system and they are systematically fixing the system,” Wadhwa said. “I’ve got to give them credit for being innovative over here. I rarely say good things about governments. This is one of those rare occasions when they do something right.”

Wadhwa said immigrants are major contributors to the U.S. innovation and competitiveness.